"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance"

Poetry resembles a reverberation—an echo returning through the chambers of thought and time, not merely repeating but evolving as it travels. Carl Sandburg conjures the image of poetry as more than words; it is a living resonance, calling across silence, reaching for something intangible. The echo is not static; it seeks response, interaction. The act of asking a shadow to dance suggests an invitation to what is intangible and elusive. Shadows are forms shaped by light and perspective but never fully graspable. A shadow can only move if something moves to cast it, yet it remains untouchable and always just out of reach.

When poetry asks a shadow to dance, it courts the ineffable, the invisible moods and undercurrents inside human experience. Poetry cannot force understanding or emotional response, nor can it compel reality or memory to take form. Instead, it seeks to animate what hides in recesses—the unspoken, the lost, the half-remembered—giving subtlety and motion to the dark corners of the psyche. The image is playful, even hopeful: despite the impossibility of making a shadow truly dance, poetry persists, seeking some connection with that which eludes direct expression.

By characterizing poetry as an echo, Sandburg evokes the sense that poems are responses to the world, history, personal memory—a repetition with difference, always evolving, never duplicating exactly. Shadows represent those faceless fears, desires, dreams, or sorrows we all carry. The echo’s call invites these latent aspects into movement, making the invisible half-glimpsed, the silent nearly audible.

Through this poetic metaphor, the purpose of poetry is reimagined: rather than imposing clarity or answers, it creates space for interaction between the conscious and the subconscious, reality and imagination. Poetry’s artistry lies in encouraging the intangible to reveal itself, even fleetingly, offering us glimpses of the profound, the hidden, and the mysterious.